


The Pythian Prophecies

by Amuly



Series: Eleusian Mysteries [3]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Drug Use, Historical, M/M, Philosophy, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:42:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28231875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amuly/pseuds/Amuly
Summary: When Nicolo becomes immortal, he knows there must be a reason behind it. So he begins a search through time and space to find his answers. Yusuf tags along with him, because like it or not, their fates are clearly intwined. (and then, eventually, they fall in love, so that’s a good reason too).Part III (of III): Nicolo and Yusuf travel further afield in Nicolo's search for answers. They explore cults, religions, philosophies, and cultures far from their own: a whole world away, even. But in the end, does Nicolo ever find answers to his satisfaction, or will he wind up right back where he started? (Part 3 of 3)
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Eleusian Mysteries [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2019172
Comments: 20
Kudos: 53





	The Pythian Prophecies

There were numbers in the rain.

Nicolo sat on stone, staring at the rain coming down before him. _Drop. Drop. Drop_. _Five. Six. Seven_. Concentric circles splashing out from every drop from above, perfect circles, equidistant in every spot from the center, interrupted only by another drop, another series of circles, infinite circles, continuing infinitely…

“Nicolo…”

The voice… the vibrations… there were numbers in the sound. Vibrations making their way from Yusuf’s throat, to the air, to Nicolo’s ears… Yusuf’s tongue, his voice: there were numbers in his voice. A ratio, maybe, a harmony. Pitch and tenor-

“Nicolo?”

His name. A response. Nicolo shook his head from side to side, slowly, feeling his body cut through the air like the sound waves from Yusuf’s voice traveled from his throat to Nicolo’s ears. Nicolo blinked, slow. Felt his eyes move in his skull as he dragged them to look.

“Yusuf.”

There were numbers in his face. A symmetry that went down the vertical. A ratio, a golden ratio, that you could make: chin to nose and chin to forehead, that was one. Chin to mouth and chin to eyes: that was another. Smaller and smaller ratios, written out across Yusuf’s face, his very being. Nicolo reached a hand out and touched, thumb trailing over his lips, fingers tracing the line of his nose. Nicolo smiled.

“Yusuf.”

“Nicolo. How do you feel?”

Blink. Blink. The rain was falling, hitting Yusuf’s head. It dripped from his eyelashes, spilled down from his curls. Curls… a spiral… earth’s natural circle, the type you’d get from a pendulum, a circle drawn by nature itself. Nicolo brought his free hand up to touch Yusuf’s curls, tug at them and let them fall back, to run his hand through them.

 _Yusuf_ was numbers. Number. Num _ber_?

The _world_ was numbers.

Num _ber_?

 _One_ …

They woke up the next morning wrapped around each other on a cliff in Siracusa. The cultists they’d befriended had kindly led them back to a small stone home—not even tall enough to stand in, just enough to crawl inside and sleep with your head safe from the elements—and built a fire outside. The fire was burned down but it had kept the nighttime chill away, at least. Nicolo crawled up to look out the small window in the hut. Yusuf lifted his head just enough to squint tiredly at Nicolo.

“What the fuck was that?” Yusuf groaned, running a hand over his face.

Nicolo was quiet as he watched the waves crash over the cliffside, listened to the seagulls waking up with the dawn.

“I do not know,” Nicolo thought aloud. Stones laid in a pattern, waves crashing in and going out and crashing in again. Hexagons in beehives, spirals in snail shells, triangles in flower petals. The numbers were all around them: nature breathed numbers. And yet…

“Not an answer.”

* * *

The Christians had gotten to the pagans long before a too-old Crusader and Maghrebi made their way to Thessaloniki. Nicolo could not show his face and be trusted. Instead, he was forced to rely on Yusuf to search for him, while Nicolo occupied his time living among the locals, learning their dialect of Greek that was so different from the Greek in the Bible, much less the Greek of Plato or Aristotle. The children laughed at how he sounded like an old man, but he could teach them their sums and figures, so the wealthier parents entrusted their boy-children to his tutelage in exchange for a tidy sum. And Nicolo took in girl-children and less well-off children as well, because what could be taught to two could just as easily be taught to four.

It was a spring morning, rainy and grey, but warmer than it had been in months. Nicolo took the opportunity to take the children out into the covered garden in one of the parents’ estates, where he tried out some more practical mathematical demonstrations.

“And if you need to reach the height of the roof, how far away should you place the ladder from the base?” Nicolo asked the youngest child, Ales.

Ales pouted, swinging his legs on the stone bench where he sat. He pointed at the ladder Nicolo was holding.

“Put it on the roof,” he ordered Nicolo. “Then measure it.”

Nicolo smirked. Mouths of babes, and all.

“What if I did not have my ladder?” he prompted Ales. “And I had to figure out what size ladder I needed?” Nicolo gestured at the garden, noting where the grass ended and the small pool in the center began. “I cannot go further out than here, yes? So how do I figure out, if the roof is eight feet above our heads, and the pool is…” Nicolo measured, stepping toe-to-heel, from the start of the roof to the pool’s edge. “Six feet from the roof. What height ladder do I need?”

Ales shrugged. “One that’ll reach the roof,” he grumbled. Then he pointed up. “Taller than eight feet.”

Nicolo chuckled. “Well, that is good. That is a start. You are using your common sense.” Nicolo turned to the other children sitting under the rooftop awning with him. “Does anyone else have any suggestions? A way we could get a more exact number than ‘taller than eight feet?’”

Drea, the only girl in the group today, stared sharp at Nicolo but said nothing. He could see the answer in her eyes, but he waited to see if she would voice it herself. She never did—she knew she didn’t belong here, that her parents were not paying Nicolo to teach her, but her brother: Eskander, a few years younger than her. But she chaperoned him on days she could get away from her household duties, and her mind was cleverer than her brother’s, infinitely more adept at manipulating figures. Nicolo’s heart ached for her, because she was too old to be called a child anymore, and he knew she knew this as well. The time she could get away with childish whims like going to school with the boys grew desperately short. But she was here, still, and Nicolo loved this sweet, sharp little girl for it.

“Eskander?” Nicolo prompted, but Eskander shook his head straight away and looked to his sister. Drea stayed quiet.

“Grigori?”

His oldest in this group, and richest. Grigori wasn’t stupid by half, but he was uninterested in the sort of math Nicolo had been assigned to teach them. He had more a merchant’s mind, like Yusuf’s, and none of Yusuf’s patience and curiosity in things that did not immediately benefit him. Grigori sighed and tilted his head back as he thought.

“Triangles, right?”

“A good guess, since there are usually triangles involved,” Nicolo teased. “What _about_ triangles?”

Grigori made a big show of sighing again before picking up his stylus and wax tablet. “Uh… The ladder and the roof make a triangle.”

“Good. Fill in what you know.”

“Uh… I don’t know the ladder length.”

Nicolo hummed. “Very good. Knowledge of what you don’t know is still something you know: often just as important, if not _more_ important, than what you do know.”

Drea nodded seriously, soaking in Nicolo’s words of wisdom. Eskander seemed to be giving a good faith effort to understand, while Grigori and Ales were not absorbing the lesson quite so seriously. Ah, well. One and a half out of four was not so bad.

“You said four feet to the pool. So that’s… the bottom of the triangle. To the roof, that’s eight feet. So that’s the… other leg of the triangle, right?”

“Very good. And so, like you said, the ladder is what is left. Before you go any further, Grigori, can anyone tell me: what part of the triangle does the ladder make up in this scenario? It has a special name.”

Drea’s eyes glinted. Nicolo nodded at her. “Drea.”

“Hypotenuse,” she whispered.

“Exactly right,” Nicolo told her, as he knew she would be. He turned back to his other children. “And how do we calculate the hypotenuse? This has a special name, as well, if you can remember it.”

Grigori was chewing the end of his stylus.

“It’s squares, isn’t it?” he was grumbling to himself. “I remember you constructing this. Something about squares on the sides.”

“Hm, something about squares…” Nicolo mused. He caught Drea’s eye and winked. She suppressed a smile only with the utmost effort.

At lunch he sent the kids scattering for their homes. It was only as he made to join them that he caught sight of Yusuf, standing with his arms crossed over his chest, watching Nicolo teach from the shadows. That he could still sneak up on Nicolo after all these decades was, honestly, embarrassing. Nicolo should be better than this. But he was with his children and it was a rainy spring day. Perhaps he could be forgiven.

“I’ve found your pagans,” Yusuf said with no preamble. Nicolo straightened, attention suddenly rapt.

“Today? Here, nearby? Have you spoken with them?”

Yusuf hushed Nicolo and his flurry of questions, reaching his hands up to clasp at Nicolo’s, always fluttering, pulling them into his chest. His thumbs rubbed over the backs of Nicolo’s hands in soothing lines.

“They will see you,” Yusuf told him, ignoring all his questions entirely, but still somehow managing to answer the only question Nicolo actually cared about. “To _talk_ ,” Yusuf continued, lest Nicolo get his hopes up too quickly. But Nicolo was an expert at getting his hopes up and being always disappointed. He was used to picking himself up and smiling through the blood in his teeth. Having Yusuf there to help wipe the blood from his mouth probably did much to sustain him, too.

Nicolo lifted his chin at Yusuf. “They will let me in,” he said, certain. “They will share their sacred mysteries with us.”

Yusuf sighed, reaching both hands up to flatten down Nicolo’s hair and stare him in the eyes. “I’m in love with a fool,” he commented. But then he kissed Nicolo, because they were fools in love, together. Nicolo laughed as he broke the kiss, scurrying out into the rain, grabbing Yusuf’s wrist and dragging him behind. Yusuf jogged with him, grabbed him, caught him, kissed him some more. The rain was sweet as it ran down their faces, between their lips. There were numbers in the rain.

* * *

Nicolo stood on a hill, watching the kites fly in the valley below them. There were so many different shapes and designs. Some looked like dragons—the Oriental type of dragon, not the Church’s dragons—and were so elaborate it was hard to tell where engineering ended and art began. But others were more simply designed, though no less impressive for it. There were shapes like triangles pasted onto each other, and others that were like hollow boxes, somehow flying high in the sky. Nicolo squinted at those, mind supplying something, though he couldn’t quite remember what…

“They look like the Jew rattle,” Yusuf realized, snapping his fingers. Nicolo’s brow smoothed as he gasped.

“Of course, they do! The Tree of Life. The box kites, they…” Nicolo pondered this in wonder.

“Do you think it means anything?”

Nicolo shook his head. Ratios, numbers, shapes that kept repeating over and over again, following him from one end of the world to the other. There had to be a meaning in it, a pattern, a code, but…

“I think it does. But what: I do not know.”

“It is number, maybe,” Yusuf pondered, crossing his arms and resting his chin in one fist. “Your Pythagoreans: they say the number is holy. Is in everything.”

The kites sailed high above the valley. Nicolo could barely make out the children and adults in the grass below. Their laughter, though: the sound of it could be heard clearly, even from where he and Yusuf were standing. Carried by the same wind that carried their kites. Nicolo watched the little human families guide their magnificent creations through the skies above them. It was a wonder. It was nothing he had ever seen before.

Yusuf’s hand slipped into his own. Nicolo glanced down between them, seeing the dark and light skin against each other, the bumpy circle their fists made together split by a seam down the middle.

“These Ruists: they have their sacred numbers, too.”

Nicolo nodded, still staring at their fists. Yes, yes: they had their sacred numbers. Their numerical mysteries. Hexagrams and codes, numerology and cleromancy. Nicolo could study with these strange but brilliant foreigners for a hundred years and still have trouble grasping the Zhōu Wén Wáng code that uncovered meaning in their _Book of Changes_. It was possible he _had_ a hundred years to study with them, and a hundred more after that.

“My moon?”

Nicolo smiled faintly. “My sun?” he replied. Yusuf pouted.

“Ah, do not mock me. My gentle heart cannot stand it.”

“I do not,” Nicolo promised him.

In contrition he brought Yusuf’s hand up to his lips and kissed the knuckles, one by one. Yusuf’s smile was brilliant and beautiful. Shining like the sun.

“Do you think…” Nicolo held their clasped hands before him, examining them. He met Yusuf’s eyes above their hands. “Do you think we are… made whole? By each other?”

Yusuf’s mouth opened quickly—to affirm, to sing Nicolo’s praises, to declare the beautiful unity of their love, Nicolo could tell—but then he hesitated. Closed his mouth and considered the question more carefully before answering.

“You were always whole, my love. Never let it be said that you needed me to be made great.”

Nicolo’s mouth twisted at Yusuf’s unwavering love. “Made better by you, though. Every day.” Yusuf shrugged humbly.

But that wasn’t an answer to Nicolo’s question: none of it was. Nicolo tugged at Yusuf’s hand, pulling him back to look down on the valley where the mass of kites were flying what seemed like miles high, scraping the bottom of the heavens.

“These Ruists, they love their opposites. Complimentary, they think: natural order. Hot and cold. Fire and water. Earth and air.”

“This is the _yin_ and _yang_ ,” Yusuf tried, a little uncertain. He may have already become fluent in Yue in the few years they’d spent in the kingdom, but his knowledge was that of a merchant and trader, not an academic.

“Yes.” Nicolo hesitated, not sure if he should voice his next thought. It had been percolating in the back of his skull for some time, but he worried it would show his ignorance. Or, worse: his bias to his own way of thinking, to the thinking of his countrymen and others similar to himself. But of course, Yusuf would never think ill of him—and could tell Nicolo if he was being ridiculously Genovese or if his ideas had more universal appeal.

“In their _Book of Changes_ , there is a numerical code. Broken and unbroken lines, all in groups of six.”

“You’ve shown me,” Yusuf nodded. “The squares of lines. Some of them look like little houses. Others like boats, or tunnels.”

Nicolo ducked his head as he smiled.

“Yes. The squares of lines that can look like houses. Or boats. The broken lines, they are yin. The unbroken, yang. I…” Nicolo hesitated, then continued: “It reminds me of thee Pythagoreans’ limited and unlimited. From which all other numbers are generated.”

Yusuf considered this. “Limited is broken, yin. Unlimited is unbroken, yang. Yes?”

“Yes,” Nicolo confirmed. “Limited can also be even. Unlimited, odd.”

“So many pairings,” Yusuf hummed. He glanced at Nicolo. “Dualities.”

“Generating everything. One not able to exist without the other.”

“I do not understand numbers like you,” Yusuf reminded him. He reached up with his free hand to brush Nicolo’s hair back from his face, wind picking it up and stirring it about. His hand settled on the side of Nicolo’s head as he gazed into his eyes with something like wonder. “I cannot see the worlds you hold in your mind. These infinities you turn over and capture as easily as I can finite sums and figures. It is… divine. So I do not know if these Ruists mean the same as the Greeks, or if you are missing something.”

That was exactly what Nicolo had been wondering, fearing. If he had, in his ego, mistook himself for understanding the Ruist’s numerology, or if he was truly feeling at the edges of something… true. Something right.

“I need more time,” Nicolo muttered, not even meaning it aloud. But Yusuf smiled brilliantly at him and tugged his hand back to his mouth to kiss it again, before abandoning it to pepper Nicolo’s mouth with those same, endearing kisses.

“Isn’t it wonderful, then, that we have so much of that?”

* * *

Freezing to death wasn’t the worst way to die. Not by far. But to two Mediterraneans, it felt particularly wrong.

But when the ice cracked beneath their feet and a man slipped and fell into the frigid waters, both men dove in after him without a second’s thought. The Xiongnu they were with dragged the three onto more solid ice and built a snow fort as they quickly stripped and pressed against each other for warmth. The next morning, when the man lived, he kissed Nicolo and Yusuf’s cheeks boldly, thanking them in a language they didn’t understand yet. But the Xiongnu were happy to keep Nicolo and Yusuf with them as they made their long, cold journey to the east, and at night Nicolo sat in the snow shelters they built and listened to their wise men, struggling with the language to learn all he could.

* * *

Yusuf coughed heavily, wiping at his eyes as he passed the pipe over to Nicolo. “Thank you,” he said to the Paiute shaman, who laughed.

Nicolo eyed the pipe warily. Sucking smoke into your lungs through a tube: certainly seemed a way to hasten an early death. Of course, that didn’t really matter to them. But he wondered how the Paiute did this without coming to harm.

At the nod of the shaman Nicolo brought the pipe to his mouth and inhaled. Smoke filled his lungs, but it wasn’t horribly acrid. Not the smoke of burning buildings, or a campfire. Certainly not the smoke of burning flesh. Nicolo held it in his lungs for a moment like the shaman had showed him, then exhaled, coughing only a little. Until Yusuf slapped his hand against Nicolo’s back, and Nicolo found himself doubled over, wracked with coughs. He could hear the shaman laughing again, and the other men in the tent with them commenting among themselves.

His head felt good when he was done, though. Clearer, sharper. But heightened in a supernatural way as well. Not as intense as his time in Siracusa, of course. Or in Thessaloniki. But… something.

The shaman being speaking. Yusuf translated as best he could—they’d only just managed to cobble together major nouns and verbs with the Paiute people, but even so, they stuck in Yusuf’s head more surely than they did in Nicolo’s. And the shaman spoke too fast for Nicolo to pick the unfamiliar sounds apart and match them to the Genovese words in his head.

“He says now we will feel the… the _puah_. The natural force. He says to breathe…” The man next to Nicolo passed him the pipe again. The smoke went down smoother this time. Nicolo’s head grew lighter.

There was… something. Nicolo tried to reach out for it, to touch it for himself. But… he blinked smoke from his eyes, shaking his head. The men in the tent were murmuring to each other, nodding at him and Yusuf, then to themselves. They were watching how Nicolo and Yusuf were taking it, this smoking pipe. Nicolo straightened his back and breathed carefully.

“The sky, the dirt, the animals…” Yusuf continued to translate for the shaman. His eyes were fixed on the old man, eyes working as much as his ears were as he took in facial cues from the shaman to help him understand. Nicolo remained awed by how he did that: how his Yusuf could, more impressive than just recollect words (which Nicolo himself was perfectly fine at), could hear accents, pick apart intonations, syllables, hear what people were meaning to say and connect it in his mind to the lexicon of new words he’d learned for this new language. Nicolo could never do that part, the hearing of words, and Yusuf did it like he did everything: effortlessly, with good humor and compassion for his fellow man. Nicolo loved him for it. Nicolo loved him for so many things.

“The…” Yusuf frowned, shook his head. Said something in Paiute Nicolo didn’t even try to parse. That’s what Yusuf was here for. To be his ears and tongue.

The pipe was passed to him again and Nicolo breathed in the sweet smoke in an imprudent act. The tent expanded around him as he exhaled. There was that _something_ again, just on the periphery of his mind. He could nearly touch it…

“The natural force ties us together. Or…” Yusuf listened intently, brows drawn together over his soulful brown eyes. Nicolo watched him work. “We _are_ the force. It’s… part of us. And part of… no. Everything is a part of _it_. And so are we. The rocks… dirt. Water…”

“‘And the rocks and stones themselves will start to sing…’” Nicolo murmured, eyes blurry.

A shout. Strange and high-pitched. Nicolo jumped in his seat, but his head was too fuzzy to stand, to do anything but look around. The shout again, and more: the shaman was yelping. And so were the other men, joining in one-by-one. But then… not shouting. _Singing_. Nicolo sat, awed, as this strange way of making music slowly coalesced into a harmony, like points of paint seen at a distance. Nicolo felt out with his hands, palms down, digging into the earth at his sides. _The rocks and stones themselves…_

The next morning Nicolo awoke in his tent with a headache and stale breath. As he rose for the day his guts rumbled in warning and he found himself running for some privacy. When he got back he felt hollowed out and empty. Yusuf was rising, looking beautiful and golden, perfect and with no signs of the sickness that still crept at the edges of Nicolo’s gut.

Truly there was no justice in the universe and Nicolo was a fool to seek it out.

Yusuf stretched outside their tent, tunic rising up to show his stomach. Nicolo snuffled and pressed his hand to the strip of skin, folding himself against Yusuf’s chest. Yusuf wrapped him up in his arms and rocked him gently.

“Morning, my sunrise,” Yusuf hummed, pressing a kiss to his hair. “How do you feel?”

Nicolo sighed. “Tired. Sick.”

“What about last night?”

Nicolo shook his head—very slightly, in deference to his headache.

“Maybe there is a force out there. Just beyond our sight. But I cannot see it.”

* * *

The children’s whimpers sounded loud in the dark of night, and Nicolo had to fight against the urge to tell them to _quiet down_ , to breathe slower, or the bad men might hear them. Instead he forced himself to breathe slower and continued forward, feet barely managing to pick out a path through the mountainside.

A crash, a cry. Nicolo stumbled to a stop, several of the children grabbing onto his legs as he turned around. Yusuf’s voice whispered through the night:

“I have her. Keep going, _mi amor_.”

One of the children tugged at Nicolo’s skirt. Quickly he scooped him up before continuing on through the mountainside, toes kicking against rocks and sending them skittering down the mountain even as Nicolo tried to tread carefully, quietly.

The child in his arms started crying. Nicolo shushed him, rubbing his back in staccato bursts between pushing his hand forward in the darkness, groping blindly for tree branches on their non-path. “It is okay, little one,” Nicolo tried to tell him in broken Maya. “We are just going next door. Where your aunties live.”

Yesterday, that same child would have teased Nicolo about his toddler-like grasp of Maya, made fun of him for his heavy Genovese accent, peppered Yusuf with questions about _is he stupid because he is so pale? Is he sick?_ But now, even though Nicolo knew his Maya was no improved, the child said nothing—not a laugh, not a teasing remark. He just clung to Nicolo’s neck and sobbed brokenly, hot tears soaking Nicolo’s shawl.

Dawn broke across the mountain range hours later, as Nicolo and Yusuf stood, exhausted, with a dozen children in their arms and clinging to their legs, backs, the biggest ones bringing up the rear behind them holding the smaller children in their arms. Yusuf reached out for Nicolo’s arm, nodding to another mountaintop, in the direction they had just come. Smoke was pouring from Zaculeu, turning the morning sky red.

“Let us keep going,” Nicolo told him. It was all they could do, now.

The boy in his arms had been swapped out for a girl at some point during the night. She was asleep against his chest, somehow still clinging to her cornhusk doll in her sleep. Every time Nicolo shifted her in his arms, he made sure the doll stayed safe in her fingers.

Four hundred fifteen grains of maize for the new year. Forty-nine grains of maize burnt with incense. Today was fifteen kumk’u. If he had a moment he could sit down and figure out the Long Calendar math the way the jemn in Zaculeu had shown him. He could know exactly what day was dawning red and how long it had been since the start of the cosmos, based on the Maya astronomy.

But what good did it do him? His Church had calendars, Yusuf’s people had calendars, Quynh’s people had calendars… The Maya, with their incredible astronomical knowledge, with their perfectly mathematicised cosmos: what good did it do them?

They still fought wars against each other. They still burned each other’s cities, and orphaned each other’s children, and no order in the cosmos, no amount of number and system, could change the fate of Nicolo and Yusuf, trying to save who they could and never being able to do _enough_.

“Nicolo?”

Nicolo shook his head, shifting the girl to his other arm, watching to make sure she kept hold of her doll.

“It is nothing.”

“Nicolo…”

“I think I-” Nicolo started, shouted. Then he stopped, tried to calm himself. But there were children shuffling all around him, children without homes, and- and-

“I think I do not know which is worse: the Paiute uncertainty or the Maya’s damn _certainty_ ,” Nicolo spat. “It is like the Gnostics and the Jews, like-” Nicolo growled. “We have traveled the Earth, and there are only two answers, over and over again, no matter where we go, no matter what language the people speak or what color their skin: it is either we have no control or we fool ourselves, we invent numbers and, and _zero_ , and we say, ah, we know the nothing, we can _name_ the nothing, we can use it, in our calendars, in our al-gorithms, and now, now: we have control. We _know_. But they never know!”

Nicolo was shouting. He stumbled to a stop, child slipping in his arms. Nicolo was crying.

Yusuf passed his child to one of the older ones, scooped up Nicolo’s and did the same. Then he pulled Nicolo into his chest and stroked his back, just as Nicolo had been trying to offer cold comfort to these children without a family. Still, somehow, it helped.

“I am fine,” Nicolo lied, pushing at Yusuf. He wiped at his face. “Let us go.”

But Yusuf wasn’t finished with him yet. He clasped Nicolo’s face between his hands and looked him in his eyes. The bags under Yusuf’s eyes were deep, and his skin sallow in spite of the summer sun that just yesterday he had been playing in, shirtless and golden as he kicked a ball around with the other young men of Zaculeu. Men who were likely dead, now. While Yusuf and Nicolo continued on.

“Allahu akbar,” Yusuf reminded him. “I know it is not the answer you want to hear. It cedes control. But at least there _is_ control.” He smiled crookedly. “It is just not in your hands.”

Nicolo’s shoulders dropped. Ah: the problem. He shook his head, but it turned into a nod.

“Δόξα τω θεώ,” he muttered bitterly.

Then he picked up his children, and Yusuf picked up his, and the rest followed them as they continued on, the dawn at their backs.

* * *

The ocean was grey and mean beyond the cliffs: great whitecap waves crashing far below, the smell of salt spray reaching Nicolo even at his great height. The skies were nearly as bad, grey clouds so low Nicolo was surprised his head didn’t scrape the bottom of them. Some of these Norwegians’ heads might—they were an irritatingly tall people. Yusuf and Nicolo looked like boys before their first beard among them. Nicolo especially, as he couldn’t grow a beard quite as fierce and thick as the perfectly-braided Norwegians’.

He could hear when Yusuf came up behind him. Or perhaps he didn’t, over the sound of the wind and ocean. Perhaps he just sensed it, knowing where Yusuf was without looking as surely as he’d know the position of his own hands with his eyes closed. Either way, he knew why Yusuf was here: the ships were leaving. The last ships.

“We travel around the Earth herself, and we end up in the company of Christians,” Nicolo called back over his shoulder. He turned with a grimace as Yusuf took that as an invitation to step up level with Nicolo. “I think that is a point for my side, although I do not relish it.”

“You can have your kingdoms of ice and stone,” Yusuf told him, arms wrapped tight around his own chest. “My people are too wise to venture this far north. Leave it to you.”

Nicolo’s jaw was tight. They were joking, but there was no humor in either of their voices. Nicolo was looking for a fight, and maybe, for once, Yusuf would give him one.

“The ends of the earth,” Nicolo repeated. He glared at Yusuf. “And we are back where we started. No further.”

“A top spinning on its axis still moves,” Yusuf mused, not rising to the bait.

“There is nothing,” Nicolo spat. “Nothing. No one knows why we cannot die. No one can tell us what God wants. It is all the same mysticism and nonsense. Drawing patterns in the dark.”

Yusuf remained quiet.

“What does God want us to _do_?”

“That, I can tell you,” Yusuf reminded him.

“Allahu akbar,” Nicolo repeated. He spun on Yusuf. “But that does not tell _me_ what to _do_.”

“You want someone to tell you what to do?” Yusuf asked him. “Get on the boat. Put your back into the oars. Get these men back to their ancestral homes in Norway. That is what you will do for the next month, two months.”

“But we don’t know _why_ ,” Nicolo pressed. “I know- we _know_ what God asks of us. Of _everyone_. But why _this_ gift? Why _us_? It is not enough to know, yes, praise His name, yes, do His will, when He has bestowed _eternal life_ onto a failed priest and an infidel.” Nicolo grabbed at Yusuf’s coat. “Is there a _plan_? And why can’t I _see it_??”

For the first time in a long, long while, Nicolo saw a flash of rage contort Yusuf’s features. He slapped Nicolo’s hands off him, paced away. Paced back, and he was still _angry_ , he was livid, pointing a finger at Nicolo with one hand and sweeping the other to his side, out over the ocean.

“Look _around_ , my _stupid, beautiful_ star. _Look_ , you dense stone of _intractable_ weight. What have we _done_ , my love? How could you wish to see any greater plan? Why _else_ would we have been put here, than to take care of the sick, to protect the defenseless? Wouldn’t any other purpose _lessen_ that? You wish for the word of God, but you do not _listen_ when I and every holy man tells it to you. Listen, habibta, listen, for I speak it: devote yourself to caring for others. That is God’s _only_ edict. That is God’s _every_ edict.”

Nicolo’s knees buckled beneath him. He fell to the cold rocks beneath their feet, tears freezing to his cheeks as he sobbed. He clasped his hands before him and stared out over the wicked oceans as Yusuf’s rage vibrated against the inside of his skull.

“I thought there would be a number. I thought I could quantify it.”

“There is, my dawn. I just revealed it to you.”

Something cracked inside Nicolo’s chest. He felt it, a solid weight suddenly _moved_ from where it once sat. Like the stone pushed away from the tomb. And where that had once been nothing but despair there was now love and understanding deeper than Nicolo had ever felt.

Socrates had said it. All those years ago, before the birth of Christ. All Nicolo could know was that he did not know; all that was certain was the uncertainty of it all. Nicolo would not know until he knew, and that day may never come. But in the meantime, there was the work.

Nicolo prayed in the words of his God for the first time in a long time. And when he was done he got to his feet, brushing the grit from his knees, accepting Yusuf’s hand up. And he huddled against Yusuf against the cold: two Mediterraneans at the top of the world, frozen down to their socks. But today, tomorrow, they would be setting sail with the last of the Norwegians to help them home. After that, they would travel south as quickly as they could. As the weather warmed and their blood sang, they would start to hear rumors about a Scythian and a Viet woman, fiercer than an army of Amazons in battle. And Yusuf and Nicolo would join them. And do the work.

Coda

They were calling it the Year Without A Summer. It was December now—the second December of a winter that had never ended—and all hope for a late or delayed summer were long since gone. Now the solstice approached again and the people had no crops from the former summer that never dawned. The Thames was frozen solid, ships unable to move up it. People were saying it was the end of the world: God’s judgement upon them for this decadent and sinful age they lived in. For their crimes of coffee consumption, liberty, daring to defy the divine rule of kings, coal-burning factories, the migration of families from the countryside to cities.

Yusuf was sure it wasn’t.

Andromache didn’t care if it was.

Nicolo hoped it wasn’t. But he knew there was no way to know until it… was. And so they did what they always did and went to work.

The grain rations were meager and bandits were bolder as their stomachs grew emptier. But worse than the bandits were the men in power. No one in a castle ever starved when the going grew lean.

Yusuf was yawning on the other side of the cart filled with stolen grain as they trudged beside it through the sludge-soaked roads. His posture was lazy, arms stretched above his head, then buried under his coat against his chest. A lesser man would think he was inattentive, an easy target. Nicolo, of course, was no lesser man.

A snowball hit Nicolo’s head and he sputtered, shaking off the snow as he turned to glare at Yusuf over the sides of the cart. Yusuf, of course, grinned broadly back at him.

So perhaps Nicolo _had_ overestimated Yusuf’s state of repose.

“When this miserable fucking winter is over, we should go south. For a decade.” Yusuf shook snow from his glove with a look of disgust. “Somewhere where snow is a tall-tale from far-off lands. Somewhere you can earn your tan back and you can stop complaining that you are so pale compared to me—then, you will remember that no matter how much time you spend in the sun, you will never compare to my bronzed beauty.”

That surprised a giggle out of Nicolo, which of course only encouraged Yusuf.

“We will sit on our asses all day feeding each other fruit and sweating against our bedsheets, windows thrown open for the sea breeze and complaining about how hot it is.”

Nicolo smiled easily at Yusuf’s fantasizing. He could almost feel the warmth on his cheeks, smell the sea air. They always were at their best on the Mediterranean together. It was where they met, where they spent so many years together.

Curiously, not where they first made love. Nicolo chuckled to himself as he kept his head bent against the frigid December wind, feet frozen to numbness long ago. Well: everything could not fit into perfect patterns. At least, not from the myopic point of view they lived their lives. Perhaps, a thousand more years, and he’d be able to see a meaning behind that small village in India.

“Fuck, I think a toe just fell off,” Yusuf grumbled, stomping his feet.

“Really?”

“No,” Yusuf whined. “But I wouldn’t know if it did. Feet went numb hours ago.” He cursed and glared at the grey skies, sun a distant memory. “I know this winter will end and spring will dawn beautiful and sun-kissed. But in the meantime: my nipples are freezing off, _habibta_.”

Nicolo barked a laugh at that, finally unable to keep his amusement to himself. But how his Yusuf did manage to surprise him, even still, after all these years.

Nicolo sighed fondly at looked over the cart at his beloved. “Ah, well. It is not nearly so bad as Siberia, or Greenland?”

Yusuf grumbled and pulled his arms in tighter against his chest, rubbing furiously. Nicolo wondered if his nipples really _did_ ache. Should he try to help Yusuf warm up? Nicolo smiled. Ah, but: there was Yusuf’s ploy, likely, wasn’t it?

“Oh yes, my dear: I remember the many, _many_ wint _ers_ of our discontent.” He sighed dramatically as he gazed over at Nicolo. “If I had known you were such a masochist I might’ve not fallen in love with you.”

Nicolo grinned, head tilted back as he took in the grey clouds above their heads.

“Yes you would have.”

“Yes I would have.”

“But besides the cold,” Nicolo continued. “Do you remember what you told me?”

“Of course I do.”

Nicolo over to find Yusuf’s eyes on him: those beautiful, compassionate, wise brown eyes. Full of purpose and determination; fiery passion and deep, unwavering love. Nicolo loved this man, his sun, his guiding star, around which he orbited, to whom he looked to orient himself in this life beyond explanation.

“I am happy you are here beside me,” Nicolo told him. “I am happy to do this work.”

Yusuf opened his mouth to reply, but before he could there was the soft crack of snow beneath boots—out of place, not in the settled pattern of their cohort and the cart of grain. Yusuf turned, Nicolo with him, to hunt down the source of the sound. And as the king’s guard fell on them to steal back the hoarded grain, Nicolo’s smile stayed on his face, because he was beside his beloved, and they were bent upon doing their good work.


End file.
